


Sonata for the Lovelorn

by what_alchemy



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Перевод на русский | Translation in Russian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-16 20:55:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/866513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A consulting detective consults the British government on the matter of wooing army doctors. This is not, perhaps, Sherlock’s brightest idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sonata for the Lovelorn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Piplover](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piplover/gifts).



> Originally posted [here](http://holmestice.livejournal.com/223476.html) during the June 2013 Holmestice Exchange.
> 
> [Translation into Russian available](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8162513) thanks to PulpFiction.

“All right, I’m off to work,” John says. I flap my hand at him from my place on the couch.

He drains his cuppa before leaving. I like the look of him taking it back into the kitchen — broad shoulders barely contained by today’s jumper. Shade: hideous. Like the look of him even better coming back out — led by that nose, which I should like to squish with my nose. Beset of late by the most peculiar sensations.

“And could you do a bit of tidying up, Sherlock?” he asks as he follows that nose out here. “You’re going to slip on some of those entrails and crack your skull open, no matter how thick.”

Grunt at him. He sighs, makes sure it’s loud enough for me to hear.

“Right. I’ll pick up dinner, no need to trouble yourself.”

“Why would I trouble myself?”

“Why, indeed,” he says, and doesn’t he look adorable trying to pretend he’s exasperated rather than fond? His eyes go crinkly, that’s how I know. I am the world’s only consulting detective.

Roll off couch and onto feet when the door shuts. Just four strides to the sink because I am not stump-legged like someone else round here and there it is, the mug John just finished. Bit of brown gleaming at the bottom: not rinsed. Lift and sniff round the rim. Taste, just a bit. Detect nothing but tea. Disappointed.

Do a swab nonetheless. Further study needed. Should also pick hairs from his comb for the catalogue. Wonder if they will still smell like him?

They do, a bit.

Heart like a hummingbird. Reminiscent of overdose. Not good. Have been so, so well-behaved, not even a taste in years and years. John wouldn’t like it. Lestrade wouldn’t let me in crime scenes. Hell on the Romantic good looks. 

_Overdosing — SH_

_Not — MH_

_You don’t know I could have been bingeing all night — SH_

_Know damn well. Put your feet flat on the floor and your head between your knees. No one ever died from hyperventilation. — MH_

_Where did you get your medical degree from, Housebound Voyeurs University? — SH_

_You’re very clever, Sherlock, I am overwhelmed. — MH_

_A stone and a half’s worth of overwhelmed. — SH_

_That doesn’t even make sense. You are slipping. — MH_

_Go away. — SH_

_You texted me, brother mine. About your pathetic lovelorn state. Just confess, and perhaps you will spare yourself the indignity of sicking up on his shoes at some inopportune moment. — MH_

_Preposterous. No symptoms. — SH_

_You put toffee in the hair of his last date. — MH_

_That was an accident. The ensuing haircut suited her better anyway. High forehead. — SH_

_You change his online dating profile to humiliating falsehoods when he’s not looking. — MH_

_That is merely an exercise for his mental agility. His passwords are too easy, he has to learn somehow. — SH_

_You sleep with his navy Aran jumper, for which he searches his bedroom every day since it went missing. — MH_

_It’s simply that it’s the right size when balled up for not getting a crick in my neck. Buy him a new one. — SH_

_You buy him a new one. And tell him it represents your undying love. — MH_

_I am blocking you. —SH_

The great git doesn’t listen, of course. Texts me three more times. Delete, delete, delete. 

Ridiculous assertion on his part. No quantifiable data. 

My data, bodily and therefore unseen by lurking Big Brother types: heating sensation about the lungs when John smiles, intensity increased by 12-15% when directed at me. Desire, upon John stretching and causing shirt to ride up, to bury face in little roll exposed. Barely controllable urge to press tip of finger into corner of his eye, where happiness and fluids live. John-centred thoughts while woolgathering: 57% sexual in nature, 41% cloyingly domestic, 2% other, made impossible by laws of physics and such. Unreasonable. Take up phone.

_Carbon monoxide leak? Air-bound poison? Hallucination, psychotic break, sudden onset schizophrenia? — SH_

_You remind me of haemorrhoids. — MH_

_No one asked about your health problems, Mycroft. In all seriousness: how long do I have to live? — SH_

_Entirely too long, I imagine. — MH_

_I am expiring as we speak. You can’t have any of my things. — SH_

_Oh, a skull, a harpoon, and a series of vile mould cultures which has no scientific value whatsoever. However will I go on? — MH_

_I will solve any case you bring to me, no matter how tedious and obvious. — SH_

_No you won’t. — MH_

Desperate times. Desperate measures. That’s a phrase I have heard and not deleted.

_Please. — SH_

Mycroft, damn him, tells me just what to do. He once got a real live woman to marry him.

—

Turns out, filling John’s room with all manner of blooming flowers, domestic and foreign alike, sends him into fits of sneezing.

“Oh God, Sherlock, you can’t do experiments in my room!”

Except it sounds more like, “Oh God, Sherlock, you cand do experibens in my roob!” I am an expert at translating John, even when he is disgusting. I am a genius. There is a bit of paper in Mummy’s attic that says so.

Note: John prefers not to have his nose dabbed, even though I was ever so gentle.

—

John also rejects the fat-bellied puppy I bring him.

“Do you have any idea the responsibility involved, Sherlock? Who will take care of that thing? Not you, that’s for certain, and I already clean up enough of your messes for my liking.”

John unmoved by my trembling lower lip, and by gigantic brown wall-eyed puppy eyes.

—

Procured single vial of pure oxytocin, very exclusive. Is a cloudy substance, deceptively innocuous-looking but capable of crumbling empires and making kings of peasants. Reminds me of John.

Present it. Rock up on toes, clasp hands behind back.

“Do you like it?”

“What is it?”

“It’s oxytocin, John. _Oxytocin._ ”

He frowns. Furrows appear between eyes blue as midnight in July. Will not pass lips over them. Yet. Mycroft advises patience, and I am _trying_.

“Sherlock, you know you can’t drink this. Or, whatever, inject it. You’d probably have a cardiac event.”

“It’s for you.”

Furrows deepen. He looks up at me, doesn’t smile. Looks confused, with no shades of being pleased. 

“Thank you?”

What causes the heart to feel as if it suddenly occupies the small intestine? Must do some research.

—

_Get off the sofa and change your clothes. — MH_

_Can’t. Despondent — SH_

_The whole street knows. They can smell it. How could John resist such a siren song? — MH_

_Shall never speak to you again. — SH_

_Sherlock, simply lay it out in plain language. John is not like us. — MH_

_How much plainer does it get than a gift of pure oxytocin? — SH_

_Yes, because a vial of bodily effluvia is the same as a midnight serenade. How foolish of him to mistake it for anything other than a declaration of romantic intent. — MH_

Oh. _Oh._

—

Tactical error. Dark out. Did not realise placement of Mrs. Hudson’s bins. Suspect dislocated shoulder, possible concussion, and one broken ankle, but at least the Strad is unharmed. Transport mendable, centuries-old masterpiece decidedly not.

Voices inside, Mrs. Hudson, John. Then, John’s head, leaning out the window of his own second floor bedroom.

“Oi!”

“…John?”

“Jesus, Sherlock, is that you? What the bloody hell are you doing?”

Will never admit to the sound I just made, even under pain of death. 

“Christ, I’m coming. Just — just try not move, all right?”

Light floods the garden — Mrs. Hudson’s doing. Squint against the brightness. And then he’s here, doctorly hands steady on my head, my shoulders. Gasp.

“Is that your violin? Here, give it to me.”

Mrs. Hudson bustling out, clucking at me, taking the violin away.

“Okay, can you tell me what hurts?”

“Left shoulder. Left ankle. Head.” Lips curl up, involuntary. Curious. “Bum.”

John lets out one snort of a laugh. 

“Not enough padding on that thing.” He pries open my eyes and leans in close to inspect. Could squish noses now. “Right. No concussion, thankfully. I’m going to look at your shoulder and ankle right now, okay?”

He does. He prods, I try not to make a sound. I succeed. Mostly.

“Okay, you’ve got a dislocation and sprain. I’m going to spare you the trip to A&E, we’ll hobble up to the flat, and then we’ll get that shoulder set, all right?”

“Are you sure the ankle isn’t broken?”

“Sometimes sprains can feel worse than a clean break. It’ll be fine if you rest it a good long while. Up we get.” And I’m levered up, arm hauled over his shoulders, using him like another (particularly fragrant and stubby) limb. 

“John.” 

And he’s looking up at me, and his eyes are the loveliest eyes, and his arm is around me, and everything hurts, but I am having difficulty remembering a more perfect moment than right here, right now, in orbit around John Watson.

—

Getting up the stairs takes approximately one thousand years. By the end of it John is a bit sweaty and trying not to curse me. He feels an ethical obligation not to curse at patients, even ones who happen to be His Eternally Vexing Flatmate, as he sometimes calls me. It is tolerable, as nicknames go. Not the worst thing I have been called. It comes with a possessive pronoun attached, which means vexing or not, I have a place of belonging, and it is with him.

Setting the shoulder elicits a pain so great only silence can convey the profundity of it. I cannot scream even if I were prone to such theatrics — the pain robs me of breath, of voice. But then there is John, shoving me down onto the couch, arranging my arm in a makeshift sling, fussing, sitting on the coffee table to take my ankle in warm hands.

He is wrapping it tightly when he asks what the bloody hell I was doing skulking about in the garden with my violin. 

“An experiment,” I say.

He hums out a skeptical little note. I look up at the ceiling.

“There’s a spot of damp,” I say. 

“Sherlock.”

“You ought to tell Mrs. Hudson.”

“Sherlock.”

“Oh, what? A man can’t take his violin out into the garden at night? I daresay, John, if I’d known you’d be such a mother hen about everything, I’d never have—”

“What? What wouldn’t you do, Sherlock? Move in with me? Bring me to all manner of crime scenes? Pitch yourself off buildings for me?”

Stillness. Of the body and of the breath and of the air between us. His grip on my ankle is firm, just grazing the bare skin where I am not covered by sports bandage. The muscles of his mandibles flex, and he will not meet my eyes.

“I thought we were past that.”

“What I’m not past,” he says carefully, “is your behaving as if I’m nothing to you, which happens every time you want to deflect from having a real conversation with me. Don’t feed me the lie that you’d have it any way but you and I, here in Baker Street, together. I can’t bear it. I can go about my business having, whatever, an unspoken understanding with you about being _companions_ , but I will not sit here and let you act as if we are nothing but acquaintances thrown together by happenstance. You chose me, Sherlock Holmes. And I chose you. I am not self-deluded enough to deny it.”

Hummingbird in my chest again, this time too frantic to beat its tiny little wings in something that passes for synchronicity. Of its own volition, my right hand descends to touch my fingertips to John’s where they rest on my ankle.

“I was going to play a sonata.” 

He lifts his gaze to meet mine. Draws his brows down.

“At this hour?”

“Yes.”

“Why, though?”

“Because that’s how it’s done, isn’t it? By moonlight? Under the window of the beloved? It’s in all the stories.” I’m told.

He opens his mouth, closes it. Just the suggestion of moisture on the pink bed of his tongue as it darts out to wet his lips. An habitual Johnism, one that drives me spare. His grip on my ankle grows tighter, but not enough to hurt. Never that.

“Is it?” As if choking. 

“Yes, do keep up, John.”

“Oh God, the flowers.”

“I didn’t know you were allergic. There were no clues!” And don’t think I didn’t go over it again and again in his wing of my mind palace, trying to find what I’d missed.

“I’m fairly sure anyone would be allergic to, what was that, hundreds of flowers stuffed into my tiny bedroom?”

“It was supposed to be nice!”

John, laughing now, comes to sit beside me, closer than he’s ever done before, hand on the back of my neck, gentle.

“It was,” he says, and his lovely eyes are shining with mirth. “It was very, very nice, and thoughtful, and good. Just a bit much, I suppose. Not everything has to be so — so grand.” 

“ _You’re_ grand.” My God, any old thought is popping out of my mouth just now. Obviously my injuries have rendered me verbally incontinent. Get a grip, Holmes. “I mean, you’re lovely.” Bugger.

A puff of air and John is pressing those lips of his to the bone around my eye. My cheek. My nose.

I still him. I can feel him swallow, he’s so close. I take his hand in mine, and isn’t that a singular sensation? My palm, with its countless nerve endings, sliding into his? I did not know it could feel this way. There is so much data. But. It can wait.

I squish my nose against his. It is better than I’d thought it would be.

I count his breaths as they ghost over my lips. 

I close my eyes. Can he feel my eyelashes, as I feel his? 

I stay quiet. I stay still.

—

_Mummy now owes me a small European country. — MH_

_I await the moment you expire of smugness and I become an only child, as I should have been. — SH_

_You were a diaphragm accident. — MH_

_You were a failed lab experiment. — SH_

_You’ll bring him round to hers for supper soon. Mummy will not hesitate to use the cattle prod if you do not. — MH_

_I am aware. — SH_

_So. — MH_

_Arrangements were already made. And you didn’t know about it. Get my smelling salts. — SH_

_I really must fast track Dr. Watson’s canonisation to take effect whilst he is still among the living. — MH_

_Arse. — SH_

_Foetus. — MH_

_Congratulations. — MH_

**End**

**Author's Note:**

> Now available [here](http://www.mtslash.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=92948&page=1&extra=#pid1703487) in Chinese! Thank you, [shanzhu](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shanzhu/pseuds/shanzhu)!


End file.
